I removed the charge port on the 9x and replaced it with a PS/2 port for programming.
The connectors came from a PS/2 extension cable. I stripped the jacket completely from one end of the cable and prepped it with wires from a quality PATA cable (not ribbon) and soldered it onto the appropriate pads as per http://openrcforums.com/wiki/index.php/ ... Programmer. A rubber grommet and hot glue are holding it in place. *I did tie the 9x gnd pad line in with the metal barrel of the PS/2 connector.
I soldered the other 1/2 of the cable to the 6 pin header after removing the ribbon cable from it so I could plug it into the usbasp.
I have plenty of experience with soldering and basic electronics and feel pretty confident in all my joints/connections AND the pinouts which I triple checked. I have checked the board *again to make sure I didn't have any shorts/sloppy connections.

I downloaded and installed 1.52 of companion9x, selected and downloaded the most recent opentx version, chose USBASP and USB port in settings.
Device manager shows the USBASP as properly installed and working and I've tried both versions of the driver from the aforementioned driver pkg.

When I plug the USBASP into my toughbook USB, the light comes on.
When I plug the USBASP to the 9x, nothing apparently happens. Should the tx turn on, or beep, or something? There is no battery installed and the switch is "off".
I select the red flame icon "write flash memory", select the correct hex image downloaded from earlier, click "burn" and then get an AVRdude error as follows:

Thank you!
But, I still can't get it to work.
I dl'd zdiag, used it to install WinUSB (v6.1.7600.16385)driver, it shows up under universal serial bus devices in dev manager, went into companion9x settings to double check that it's USBASP with port USB and I still get the same error when I go to read eeprom.

I even restarted and/or reinstalled the driver via zdiag.

I don't think it's pertinent, but I also installed the LED backlight with a bs170, and PIN17 is hooked up, but the no solder jumper is not plugged in.

When trouble shooting ' cant find usbasp device' issues you do not need to have usbasp hooked up to target (the radio). Once the drivers are installed properly or you otherwise resolve ' cant find usbasp device' issues you will get a 'target not found' type error. Then hook up the target (the radio). This will separate any possible wiring issues in the radio from the common windows driver issues.

I figured out that I put VCC +5v to the wrong pad on the 9x board, but have fixed it. The tx still works and now the USBASP powers up the radio AND companion9x can try to talk to it, but I get another error....
I'm googling now...

this issue is because your radio has a m128 processor not a m64 processor. I believe there are 2 places in the software where this needs to be changed.
1. in the programing section
2. in the section that determines which firmware you need to download.

maybe eventually the software will autodetect which processor your radio has.